Daily Inspiration

Moving is NOT fun

Moving isn’t much fun. Actually, it’s the preparations beforehand that I hate. The throwing away past pieces of life, the packing. Selling or donating things that just won’t fit in whatever vehicle will be used for moving. Those are the things I really dislike.

I’ve never envied my sister (you know, the one who is a VP for a major chemical company) before. But I realized today that maybe there is one thing I envy in her life. Every time she moves, the moving company comes in and packs up everything for her.

Next weekend is when the move takes place, so I really have no business being online right now. But, I needed to take a break.

I wish I had known how easy it is to sell used books at Amazon.com. If I had known that months ago, I might have been able to sell more of my huge home library. Maybe finances wouldn’t have been so tight if I’d known. The other day, I listed a $35 cookbook for sale for $22. Only 20 minutes later, the book was sold. If I had sold the book at a moving sale, I would have been lucky to get $1.

Oh well. Maybe I can leave a bunch of my books with friend to list at Amazon and share the profits with me. Or, better still, maybe I can suggest that the youth group at my church list them and share the profits with me. That way, they’d be helping me and raising funds for the youth group. I think I’ll suggest that to the youth leader.

Break time is almost over and I have to get back to tossing out memories and packing. Hey, don’t feel too sorry for me. My son and I are moving and looking forward to a new life.

Today when I logged on, there were two messages that I want to ponder later. I thought I’d make notes here to give my journal readers something to think about and so the ideas won’t get lost in the myriad of email messages just sitting in my inbox. Someday I’ll get time to dump the junk. Someday. (The way things are going, though, it won’t be until my ISP informs me that I’m about to go over my limit in storage.)

Anyway, here are the two things I want to ponder later:

One email was a message/sermonette with the title, “Rise and Shine or Rise and Whine.” Now there’s a great title, don’t you think? Is the glass half full or half empty? Should I be whining about physical and financial problems, when others are so much worse off? Or when there are still blessings all around?

The second message was about email spam. Now, there’s a hot topic. Have you noticed that spam email now often looks like a personal message, so it can slip through any filters you or your ISP might have installed? The subjects often read, “Hi Marilyn!” Another way they get around the filters is by making the subject line a bunch of gibberish. Subjects now say, “zquicbersez.” To block those kinds of messages, one would have to have an “intelligent” block, one that can recognize real words. Sigh.

What interested me in this article was that the author voiced the question about whether email spam should be likened to junk snail mail, which is legal and unregulated, or to telemarketing phone calls, which are regulated. Good question. To me, email spam is more like the intrusive phone calls made by remodelers and long distance services trying to get me to switch carriers.

When I retrieve my snail mail, I can toss it out without reading. I can certainly list myself with the phone company as one who doesn’t want to receive telemarketing calls. Or, I can buy one of those “zapper” machines with a computer voice that informs the telemarketers that I won’t accept such calls.

The email spammers claim that I can just delete their messages if I’m not interested, and that’s true enough. But they can clog my inbox so much that I reach my limit. That can result in messages I want to receive being bounced back to the senders.

Yes, this topic surely deserves some pondering. Even though I’m busy packing and tossing out junk in my apartment, I have to log on every day to delete those spam messages I don’t want. The ones about increasing body parts or about how easy it is to make a gazillion bucks.

Last year at this time, I received about 23 emails per day. Half of those were e-zine and newsletter subscriptions and half were messages from friends.

Today, I receive far more messages than that. Back in April, when I didn’t log on for 3 days, there were almost 700 messages waiting to be read or dumped. My inbox was full, and who knows how many messages were rejected? That’s not fair.

I wonder what we can do about spam emails. But I don’t think I have time to ponder that right now. I have more packing to do.